Saturday, July 9, 2011

Try organic gardening and lawn care with cheap homemade herbicides that are easy on the environment. See how vinegar, boiling water, salt and other simple ingredients and techniques can tackle any weed problem.

The battle lines of summer gardening have been drawn. On one side are dandelions, crab grass, sorrel, clover, dock, nettles, poison ivy and an endless variety of other lawn and garden weeds. On the other side: one determined Green Cheapskate. (Bing:How do you tell weeds from normal plants?)

Here are 10 ways you can win the battle against weeds this summer without doing irreparable damage to either your wallet or the environment:

1. Master the art of weed-pulling
It sounds simple, but if you've ever tried it, you know that some weeds are much tougher to pull than others. Dandelions and other weeds of the taproot variety have a mighty grip. Try watering the area directly around the weed or pulling weeds after a rainstorm, when the ground is softer. Also, insert a knife blade, screwdriver or "dandelion puller" alongside the deep root and pry it loose a little before pulling.

2. Pour boiling water on them
When I boil potatoes or pasta during the gardening season, I repurpose the boiling water by draining the pot directly onto the weeds that like to invade my backyard herb garden and patio. A splash of scalding water will shrivel even the toughest weeds in a couple of days

3. Smother them
Cover low-growing weeds such as clover and crabgrass with several layers of newspaper. Eventually, the lack of sunlight will exterminate them. Similarly, put down layers of newspaper (remember, it's biodegradable) and then cover them with mulch. This is a highly effective way of keeping weeds from sprouting up, and it helps the soil retain moisture.

Article continues below

4. Salt them
I stock up on discounted rock salt at the end of the snowy season and sprinkle it on my gravel garden paths to keep weeds from coming up in the spring (pool salt and regular table salt work as well but are more expensive). Salt also makes a good weed barrier along lawn edgings and other places you can't reach with a lawn mower. Apply it carefully, because it will erode concrete surfaces and can leave the ground barren for a long time.

5. Divide and conquer them
Never underestimate the value of physical barriers such as lawn edgings and retaining walls to keep unwanted weeds from invading your lawn or flower beds. Acting just like a fire break, physical barriers are a long-lasting solution for keeping weeds at bay. I make a simple — and cheap — lawn edging out of scraps of pressure-treated decking lumber, cutting the scraps into 8-inch "pikes" and hammering them into the ground next to each other to form a continuous edging.

6. Outnumber them
Gardening is all about a competition for resources, where the strongest not only survive but also thrive. By choosing ground covers, flowers and garden crops that will naturally outcompete weeds for sunlight, water and soil nutrients, you can dramatically reduce the number of weeds. The same principle applies to controlling weeds in a lawn: Maintain a thick, healthy lawn, and you'll have fewer weed invaders.

7. Pour vinegar on them
Douse weeds with vinegar or a mixture of half water/half vinegar (or better yet, the leftover vinegar from a jar of pickles), and they'll be dead a few days later. This is a good method for exterminating weeds with long taproots, including dandelions, dock and plantain.

8. Torch them
You don't need to set weeds on fire to kill them; quickly running a flame over them will usually cause them to wilt and die within days. You can buy a propane-powered weed scorcher designed specifically for this purpose at garden-supply stores, or just use a handheld blowtorch. Be careful not to torch poison ivy: Coming in contact with its smoke can trigger an allergic reaction just like touching it.

9. Eat them
Many so-called weeds are edible or have medicinal uses. The young greens of dandelions, dock, chicory and other common weeds can be eaten raw in salads or cooked like fresh spinach. Chicory root is often added to coffee to enhance its flavor. Pick up a copy of the classic wild-foods field guide "Stalking the Wild Asparagus" by Euell Gibbons, and you may find yourself having weeds for dinner.

10. Learn to love 'em
One man's weed is another man's rose. If you can't beat 'em, maybe you should just join 'em, and appreciate weeds for the beautiful wonders of nature they are. Many weeds are native plants that Mother Nature intended to thrive in your area; that's why they can be so hard to kill. Learning to love weeds is just a matter of expanding your cultural horizons.

For example, in Japan, moss is cultivated and prized for use in landscaping, while in the U.S. and elsewhere, moss is commonly eradicated with chemical pesticides. There's even a Dandelion Appreciation Society.

The European Parliament on Tuesday backed plans to let member states choose whether to ban the cultivation of genetically-modified (GM) crops on their territory, giving a detailed list of grounds on which such bans could be imposed.

The House voted to amend European Commission proposals for an EU regulation that would allow member states to restrict or ban the cultivation on their territory of GM crops, which have been given safety approval at EU level.

The Commission's initial proposal suggested that member states could restrict or ban their cultivation on all but health or environmental grounds, which were to be assessed solely by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA).

But the proposals have sparked a wave of criticism, with businesses fearing they could lead to fragmentation of the internal market, bringing legal uncertainty for farmers. Some of the EU executive's proposals have also been deemed incompatible with World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules.

The Parliament's report seeks to provide member states with "a solid legal basis" for banning GM crop cultivation, and to give them better legal protection in the event of challenges from trading partners opposed to bans.

The report - adopted with 548 votes in favour, 84 against and 31 abstentions – lists a number of reasons to allow member states to impose bans. These include:

• Environmental grounds: Such as pesticide resistance, the invasiveness of certain crops, threats to biodiversity or a lack of data on potential negative consequences for the environment. • Socio-economic considerations: Such as the practicality and cost of measures to avoid an unintentional presence of GMOs in other products, fragmentation of territory, changes in agricultural practices linked to intellectual property regimes, or social policy objectives such as the conservation of diversity or distinctive agricultural practices. • Grounds relating to land use and agricultural practices.

Health Commissioner John Dalli noted that specifying the grounds on which the cultivation could be restricted would indeed enhance the EU executive proposal. "I can therefore support this approach," he said.

Dalli also welcomed the Parliament's restriction criteria for being largely inspired by the indicative list that the Commission had already developed.

But he insisted that the environmental considerations put forward for banning GMOs should be clearly distinct from those that have already been assessed by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA).

In addition, he stressed that "any grounds need to be substantiated and in line with the reality of the territory in question".

In another move, the Parliament voted to change the legal basis of the Commission proposal from Article 114 (on the approximation of national law to establish the internal market) of the EU Treaty to Article 192, which is related to the environment.

The Parliament's rapporteur, French MEP Corinne Lepage (Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe), said that basing the proposal on Article 192 would give member states more say on the matter.

But Commissioner Dalli said he still thought that the Article 114 was best suited to the proposal.

The Parliament's report maintains a common EU authorisation framework for GMOs, but the House wants the risk assessment conducted at EU level by EFSA to be improved by taking into account long-term environmental effects or effects on non-target organisms before a new GMO variety can be authorised.

The Parliament also insisted that member states must take measures to prevent contamination of conventional or organic farming by GM crops, and ensure that those responsible for such incidents can be held financially liable.

UN: Only Green Technology Can Avert 'Planetary Catastrophe'

NEW YORK, New York - Humanity is near to breaching the sustainability of Earth, and needs a technological revolution greater and faster than the industrial revolution to avoid "a major planetary catastrophe," warns a new United Nations report.
"The World Economic and Social Survey 2011: The Great Green Technological Transformation," published today by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs calls for investments of at least $1.9 trillion per year to avert this catastrophe. Many of the rainforests cleared for pulp and paper production are never replanted and simply abandoned. (Photo: David Gilbert/RAN)
"It is rapidly expanding energy use, mainly driven by fossil fuels, that explains why humanity is on the verge of breaching planetary sustainability boundaries through global warming, biodiversity loss, and disturbance of the nitrogen-cycle balance and other measures of the sustainability of the Earth"s ecosystem," the report says.
"A comprehensive global energy transition is urgently needed in order to avert a major planetary catastrophe," the report warns.
In his preface to the report, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon writes that "rather than viewing growth and sustainability as competing goals on a collision course, we must see them as complementary and mutually supportive imperatives. This becomes possible when we embrace a low-carbon, resource-efficient, pro-poor economic model."
About half of the forests that once covered the Earth are gone, groundwater resources are being depleted and contaminated, enormous reductions in biodiversity have already taken place," according to the report, and, "through increased burning of fossil fuels, the stability of the planet's climate is being threatened by global warming."
"In order for populations in developing countries to achieve a decent living standard, especially the billions who currently still live in conditions of abject poverty, and the additional 2 billion people who will have been added to the world's population by mid-century - much greater economic progress will be needed," the survey advises.
"Business as usual is not an option," said Rob Vos, the survey's lead author. "Even if we stop the global engines of growth now, resource depletion and pollution of our natural environment would continue because of existing production methods and consumption habits. Without drastic improvements in and diffusion of green technologies, we will not reverse the ongoing ecological destruction and secure a decent livelihood for all of humankind, now and in the future."
To meet both the objectives of conquering poverty and protecting the environment, the World Economic and Social Survey 2011 calls for a complete transformation of technology on which human economic activity is based.
Major investments will be needed worldwide in the developing and scaling up clean energy technologies, sustainable farming and forestry techniques, climate-proofing of infrastructure, and in waste-reduction technologies, the report advises.
This "great green technological transformation" will have to be completed in the next 30 to 40 years - twice as fast as it took to accomplish previous major technological transitions.
Because of the limited time frame, governments will need to play a much more active and stimulating role to accelerate the green energy transformation, the report advises.
The survey says $1.9 trillion per year will be needed over the next 40 years for incremental investments in green technologies. At least $1.1 trillion of that will need to be made in developing countries to meet increasing food and energy demands.
The report finds the commitment set out in the Copenhagen Accord to mobilize $30 billion between 2010 and 2012 and $100 billion per year by 2020 in transfers to help developing countries cope with climate change as a step in the right direction. But delivery on these commitments will need to be accelerated and resources scaled up to ensure developing countries meet the challenge.
The report proposes to build a global public technology-sharing regime and networks of international technology research and application centers.
To rapidly spread green technology, the report says, more multilateral intellectual property rights modalities must be used than presently allowed under the World Trade Organization.
"The need for a technological revolution is both a development and existential imperative for civilization," Vos said. "This is why sustainable development is so important now, because it is not only about making improvements for life today, but also for future generations."
"Technological transformation, greater in scale and achievable within a much shorter time frame than the first industrial revolution, is required," the report states. "The necessary set of new technologies must enable today's poor to attain decent living standards, while reducing emissions and waste and ending the unrestrained drawdown of the Earth's non-renewable resources."
"Staging a new technological revolution at a faster pace and on a global scale will call for proactive government intervention and greater international cooperation," the report urges, adding, "Sweeping technological change will require sweeping societal transformation, with changed settlement and consumption patterns and better social values."
Click here to read the report, "The World Economic and Social Survey 2011: The Great Green Technological Transformation."
The World Economic and Social Survey comes out annually. Last year's survey called for a major overhaul of the machinery for international finance, aid and trade.

World Population Day: Agriculture Offers Huge Opportunities for a Planet of 7 Billion

Worldwatch's Nourishing the Planet team highlights sustainable ways to feed a growing population while also providing economic opportunities and enhancing the environment.

WASHINGTON - July 6, 2011 - As the global population increases, so does the number of mouths to feed. As we observe World Population Day on July 11th, the good news is that in addition to providing food, innovations in sustainable agriculture can provide a solution to many of the challenges that a growing population presents.
"Agriculture is emerging as a solution to mitigating climate change, reducing public health problems and costs, making cities more livable, and creating jobs in a stagnant global economy," said Danielle Nierenberg, Director of Worldwatch Institute's Nourishing the Planet project, a two-year evaluation of environmentally sustainable agricultural innovations to alleviate hunger.
This year, the world's population will hit 7 billion, according to the United Nations. Reaching this unprecedented level of population density has prompted the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) to launch a "7 Billion Actions" campaign to promote individuals and organizations that are using successful new techniques for tackling global development challenges. By sharing these innovations in an open forum, the campaign aims to foster communication and collaboration as our world becomes more populated and increasingly interdependent.
Not even demographers can actually forecast how many people will be added to world population over the coming century, noted Robert Engelman, a population expert and Worldwatch Executive Director. As more women and their partners gain access to reproductive health services and manage their own childbearing, average family size has fallen significantly in recent decades and could continue to do so, assuming expanded support for reproductive health and improvements in women's autonomy and status. The likelihood of continued population growth for some time, however, remains high. And that will add to the need to harness the ingenuity of human beings to sustain both people and the planet.
"We'll have to learn how to moderate our consumption of materials and energy and to jumpstart new technologies that conserve them," Engelman said. Innovations in farming will be among the most important: with planning, agriculture can operate not only as a less-consumptive industry, but also one that works in harmony with the environment.
Researchers with Nourishing the Planet (www.NourishingthePlanet.org) traveled to 25 countries across sub-Saharan Africa to meet with more than 350 farmers groups, NGOs, government agencies, and scientists, highlighting small-scale agricultural efforts that are helping to improve peoples' livelihoods by providing them with food and income. The findings are documented in the recently released report, State of the World 2011: Innovations that Nourish the Planet.
Nourishing the Planet's research in Africa has unveiled innovative and cost-effective approaches to agriculture where farmers are treating land as a resource rather than solely as a means for food production. Many of these solutions are scalable and can be adapted to farming systems around the world. "The global connections go beyond Africa. Everyone is in this together in more ways than one," said Nierenberg.
Nourishing the Planet recommends four ways that agriculture is helping to address the challenges that a growing global population will bring.· Urban agriculture for nutritious food and a cooler climate. The U.N. predicts that 65 percent of the global population will live in cities by 2050. Urban agriculture provides an increasing number of city residents with fruits and vegetables, leading to improved nutrition and food security. Urban farms are already gaining popularity around the world, from the Victory Programs' ReVision Urban Farm in Boston, to Lufa Farms in Montreal, to the slums of Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya.· Farming for employment and education. Opportunities in agriculture can reduce poverty and empower a growing population. In Los Angeles county, the organization Farmscape Gardens has helped tackle a 16 percent unemployment rate by hiring workers to establish and maintain edible gardens. To teach the local community about food and agriculture, L.A.'s Fremont High School established a school garden of 1.5 acres that is open to students and the greater community. And in Uganda, project DISC (Developing Innovations in School Cultivation) partnered with Slow Food International to develop 17 school gardens that are used to educate students about growing, harvesting, and preparing nutritious local foods.· Agroecology for a healthier environment. Agroecology, which offers numerous benefits to the environment while also feeding people, includes organic agriculture, agroforestry, conservation agriculture, and evergreen agriculture. In Niger, farmers promote the re-greening of dried farmland by allowing spontaneous regeneration of woody species. The restored growth has provided farmers with wind breaks, decreased evaporation, sequestered carbon, and provided non-timber forest products. In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency has partnered with representatives from metropolitan Washington, D.C. to create the Chesapeake Bay Program watershed partnership. Through collaboration, the group has developed policies, laws, incentives and best practices for farmers whose production zone lies within the local watershed. These agroecological practices, including cover crops, planting riparian forest butters, and practicing conservation tillage, have helped preserve the Bay.· Innovations in food waste to make the most of what we have. According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, industrialized countries waste 222 million tons of food annually, or almost as much as sub-Saharan Africa's 230 million tons of net food production per year. Decreasing food waste makes it possible to feed people across the planet without increasing agricultural production. In Washington, D.C., the D.C. Central Kitchen Project partners with area restaurants and food suppliers to pick up food that would otherwise go to waste. Volunteers prepare the food and redistribute it as meals to the city's poor. In central and eastern Africa, a partnership between Bayer Crop Science and the International Potato Center hopes to develop a sweet potato that is resistant to pests and diseases, which are responsible for 50 to 100 percent of crop losses among poor farmers in the region.State of the World 2011 is accompanied by informational materials including briefing documents, summaries, an innovations database, videos, and podcasts, all available at www.NourishingthePlanet.org. The project's findings are being disseminated to a wide range of agricultural stakeholders, including government ministries, agricultural policymakers, and farmer and community networks, as well as the increasingly influential nongovernmental environmental and development communities.

###

The Worldwatch Institute is an independent research organization recognized by opinion leaders around the world for its accessible, fact-based analysis of critical global issues. Its mission is to generate and promote insights and ideas that empower decision makers to build an ecologically sustainable society that meets human needs.

Monday, July 4, 2011

How the meat industry turned abuse into a business model

The meat industry routinely abuses workers and animals. Cross-posted from Mother Jones.
As a long-time student of the meat industry, I read Ted Genoways' extraordinary article on conditions at the "head table" of a factory-scale pig-processing plant with delight. As a human being, my reaction was revulsion.
In a single long piece, Genoways lays out the crude history of U.S. meat over the past 80 years. We get the unionization of the kill floor in the wake of Sinclair's The Jungle, the post-war emergence of meatpacking as a proper middle-class job, the fierce anti-union backlash of the '70s, followed by corporatization, scaling up, plunging wages, and then, well, all manner of hell breaking loose, graphically documented by Genoways. All I can add to the story is to emphasize how forces in the broader economy turned the meat industry into one that profits not by putting out an excellent product, but rather by relentlessly slashing costs.
In his story, Genoways reports that Quality Pork Processors sped up its kill line by 50 percent between 1989 and 2006, while the plant's workforce "barely increased." The strange malady acquired by those workers in Austin, Minn., makes for an eye-popping story, but the rough conditions they worked under aren't the exception -- they're industry standard. By 2005, things had gotten so dire for meatpacking workers that Human Rights Watch -- typically on the lookout for atrocities in war zones -- saw fit to issue a scathing report on their plight. The report's title says it all: "Blood, Sweat, and Fear."
What drives such routine worker abuse? What would make a company steadily increase pressure on its workers to the point of endangering them, even as wages flatline?
The surface answer is, of course, because they can. After the unions evaporated, the meatpacking workforce became extremely vulnerable. By the '90s, meatpacking had become such an awful job that native-born Americans abandoned the industry as quickly as they could. Undocumented workers from Mexico and points south, fleeing agrarian decline in those regions, filled the void. Unprotected by unions, one brush with authority away from deportation, undocumented workers are easy targets for the predatory practices of powerful employers, as Genoways demonstrates.
But there are deeper forces than naked power on display. Corporate profit strategy shifted in the wake of the 1970s -- era stagflation crisis -- in a way that transformed not just meatpacking but also the broader business landscape. Companies could no longer assume they had the power to raise prices to burnish the bottom line. Wage inflation, and the fear of it, convinced them that holding prices down was the better idea. Profit would be eked out by selling ever greater volumes of stuff -- and by holding costs, including labor costs, to a bare minimum.
As Barry C. Lynn showed in a luminous 2006 Harper's essay --later expanded into the book Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction -- the new profit regime required a new antirust regime. U.S. antitrust authorities still operated under Progressive-era policies that had them looking for instances of anti-competitive behavior. There are two ways companies wield improper market power. The first is monopoly: they use their market heft to impose artificially high prices on consumers, like, say, OPEC sometimes does with oil. The second is called monopsony. That's when dominant companies use their weight to squeeze their suppliers -- everything from their own workforces to the companies that sell them inputs -- into giving them better terms.
In the '80s under Reagan, the authorities essentially stopped prosecuting monopsony and focused only on monopoly, Lynn shows. It was a convenient change for Big Business, because gouging consumers on price was now passé; the path to profit growth lay in gouging suppliers on cost. The goal was to get as big as possible and sell products as cheaply as possible, keeping volume high and the the antitrust cops at bay; and impose relentless pressure on cost. The strategy sparked a massive wave of consolidation, as companies bought each other out, scaled up, and/or merged in a rush to grab market share.
The food industry is probably the example par excellence of the post-Reagan monopsony economy. Lynn shows that Walmart's move into groceries, starting in the early '90s, accelerated the industry's already-rapid consolidation. In order to remain profitable despite Walmart's constant demand for more product at ever-lower prices, food companies had to get bigger and bigger -- and constantly hunt for opportunities to slash their expenses.
The meat-processing giants led the way. A 2007 report [PDF] from University of Missouri researchers Mary Hendrickson and William Heffernan tells the story. In 1989, the four largest hog processors slaughtered 34 percent of the hogs raised in the United States. By 2005, that ratio had risen to 64 percent. The same trend held sway in beef and chicken -- and has only intensified since. Today, just four giant companies -- Tyson, Cargill, JBS, and Smithfield -- process more than half of the beef, chicken, and pork consumed in the United States.
Yet more consolidation may be afoot. Smithfield, by far the globe's largest pork producer, is actively looking to get even bigger. According to Bloomberg, among its potential buyout targets are Sara Lee, which has become a major player in the processed meat sector; and even Tyson, the largest overall U.S. meat producer. A combined Smithfield/Tyson would own dominant positions in pork, beef, and chicken.
As these companies lurch along, forever looking to get bigger and cut corners to maintain profitability, society pays a steep price for all the cheap meat they churn out. Genoways nailed how workers fare under our cheap-meat regime. Abuse of animals is routine. Entire ecosystems get trashed, as is the case of the Chesapeake Bay -- once one of the globe's most productive fisheries, brought to near-ruin by runoff from a stunning concentration of factory chicken farms. Family farmers are literally turned into serfs as they scale up to meet the industry's demands. And we all face the menace of the antibiotic-resistant pathogens now brewing up on animal factory farms, which now consume 80 percent of antibiotics used in the United States (both to make livestock grow faster and keep them alive in cramped, filthy conditions).
Meanwhile, the industry can be expected to vigorously fight any attempt to curtail its abusive practices. Market power extends to the political sphere -- the meat lobby is one of those powerful D.C. players that -- like oil and banking -- has the cash to maintain friendships on both sides of the political aisle. As Monica Potts recently reported on Grist, the meat lobby has financed a push to stop Obama's USDA from implementing new rules that would force the big processors to deal more fairly with farmers. The rules, mandated by the 2008 farm bill, stand in danger of being nixed. Advocates are encouraging consumers to call the White House to urge President Obama to stand strong against the pressure.Meat-industry abuse: not just for workers
As I tried to tease out above, the meat industry's business model hinges on cutting costs. And relentless cost-cutting pressure translates to relentless pressure to cut corners down the production chain, from the slaughterhouse kill floor to the factory-farm pen. Workers pay the price for the mountains of cheap meat the industry pays out.
Animals pay, too. They are treated as industrial commodities -- like identical machine parts being churned out by a factory -- not living beings that have evolved over millennia to thrive or suffer under specific conditions. Systematically objectified, factory-farm animals are subject to routine abuse. If you worked as a quality-control inspector on an assembly line, you'd think nothing slamming a defective widget into the waste bin. Widgets feel no pain. As a matter of course, animals get the same treatment, as this -- the latest in a string of appalling recent undercover videos -- demonstrates:
Now, unlike other recent cases of abuse exposure, this one isn't likely to result in the responsible company declaring the workers involved "bad apples" and firing them. Most of what you see in the video is entirely routine and industry-standard -- like the practice of cutting off the tail of piglets with a pair of shears and no anesthetics. "Tail docking," as the practice is known, is necessary on factory hog farms, because distressed hogs tend to try to chew each others' tails off. The same isn't true of hogs that live outside. Note also the practice of tossing piglets roughly across rooms -- which a plant manager is caught onscreen training workers to do, based on the theory that piglets are "bouncy."
What's happening here isn't just a moral abomination. Public health, too, is threatened by abusing animals to the point the point they have open wounds and then hoping daily lashings of antibiotics will keep infections at a manageable level. I can't imagine a better strategy for incubating antibiotic-resistant pathogens. According to Mercy for Animals, the group that planted the undercover investigator at the facility, documented these conditions:

Sick and injured pigs left to languish and slowly die without proper veterinary care

Rather than change practices in response to public outrage over these exposures, the meat industry has floated legislation in several states to ban the practice of sneaking cameras onto factory farms. It's an industry that can't bear scrutiny.

Chemical Trespass! RoundingUp Birth Defects

An international team of highly respected scientists has just released a stunning report, Roundup and Birth Defects, proving that Monsanto and industry regulators have known for decades that Monsanto’s top-selling weedkiller, Roundup, causes birth defects in laboratory animals. These findings are so shocking that I double and triple checked its findings.

Regulators have chosen to do nothing. No action to quickly pull it off store shelves. No urgent warnings to pregnant women to avoid it at all costs. The one course of action they did take was to carefully cover up their explosive findings for nearly 30 years, asserting over and over that glyphosate is safe. Meanwhile, Monsanto has made billions of dollars in profits from Roundup sales over the years, reinvesting a tidy portion of these profits in lobbying regulators in the U.S. and Europe to keep the nozzle open wide.

The report is sending shock waves around the world: moms like myself are outraged, realizing that our sisters, friends and neighbors may have used Roundup in their gardens while pregnant; Midwest moms-to-be in the corn and soy belt must be particularly anxious; regulators are certain to be scurrying for cover.

They knew it all along

We have seen all too often how Monsanto’s people have bought and paid for favorable pesticide and agricultural biotech policies in the U.S. This time, the drama is unfolding in Europe. Germany — which as “glyphosate rapporteur” is responsible for reporting the results of industry studies to the European Union — has become Monsanto’s key accomplice, assuring the European Commission again and again that industry studies indicate that glyphosate is safe.

In fact, those studies — conducted by Monsanto, Dow and other chemical companies — show no such thing. Instead they found “skeletal or visceral [internal organ] abnormalities” (for example, an extra 13th rib, heart defects, late embryonic deaths in rabbits), after exposure to the weedkiller, even at low doses. (Incredibly, Germany argued that the consequences of the heart malformations were uncertain and so could therefore just be ignored.)

Who knew what, when:

Industry has known since the 1980s that glyphosate causes malformations in experimental animals at high doses; since 1993 they've known that these effects could also occur at lower and mid-range doses.

The German government has known since at least 1998 that glyphosate causes malformations.

The EU Commission has known since 2002 that glyphosate causes malformations. (This was the year its DG SANCO division published its final review report, laying out the basis for the current approval of glyphosate.)

Monsanto's response? A statement on their website claiming that "Regulatory authorities and independent experts around the world agree that glyphosate does not cause adverse reproductive effects ... or birth defects." That's the whole point! Regulators and (corporate) experts agree, but they are not basing their agreement on the scientific evidence at hand.

Europe’s gold standard thrown under the bus (just for 20 years)

Glyphosate is coming up for review. Meanwhile, a much-heralded new European pesticide rule — presumed the gold standard in pesticide regulation — comes into force this month. If assessed according to the new rule, glyphosate would almost certainly be banned. This is because the new law requires regulators to consider “scientific peer-reviewed open literature” when assessing pesticide toxicity. And much of the independent science shows birth defects, cancer, genetic damage, endocrine disruption and other serious effects, even at very low doses.

While taking a look at what scientists are telling us about a very dangerous chemical seems like a no-brainer, the reality is that up until now, regulators have been forced to rely on badly conducted industry-generated “grey literature”. Adding insult to injury, under commercial confidentiality rules, these industry studies are withheld from the public, making it nearly impossible for the public — let alone independent scientists — to question the basis of regulators’ decisions that affect our health.

For a moment there, with this new rule coming into force, glyphosate's days seemed numbered. But never to be outdone by democratic processes, industry has succeeded in delaying its review. For a very complicated set of reasons, a thorough review of glyphosate's toxicity — taking into account the latest science and using up-to-date methodologies — will now likely not take place until 2030 — a delay of nearly two more decades.

Roundup gets a free ride

Claire Robinson, co-author of the report and researcher at the sustainability NGO Earth Open Source, explains the crucial significance of this delay:

Glyphosate could get a free regulatory ride until 2030, at a time when biotech companies are pressuring the EU for permission to cultivate glyphosate-tolerant GM seeds in Europe.

If the EU Commission gives its approval, this will lead to a massive increase in the amount of glyphosate sprayed in the fields of EU member states, as has already happened in North and South America.

In fact, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack will be in Paris this month, where at the invitation of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, he will be meeting agriculture ministers from G20 countries. According to the Hagstrom Report, Vilsack says that he will be talking about biotechnology and raising “the need for science-based rules as one of the ways to increase world agricultural production and achieve greater food security.” He should have qualified the U.S. approach as rule-making based on corporate science, not peer-reviewed science.

PAN Europe sues

On May 4, PAN Europe and Greenpeace filed a complaint before the General Court of the European Union, challenging the European Commission’s decision to delay review of glyphosate. That same decision also delays the review of 38 other pesticides, including the possible carcinogen and endocrine disruptor, 2,4-D, among other hazardous chemicals.

According to Hans Muilerman of PAN Europe,

This Commission Directive opens a backdoor to allow further market access to pesticides based on the findings of very old studies. It violates EU pesticide regulation, giving priority to the protection of commercial interests over human health.

Eight months ago, we wrote about new studies by independent scientists linking birth defects to Monsanto’s herbicide Roundup. Little did any of us know then that plenty of evidence had already been collected by the companies — just kept carefully out of the public eye.

As the Roundup and Birth Defects report’s authors put it:

The work of independent scientists who have drawn attention to the herbicide’s teratogenic effects has been ignored, denigrated, or dismissed. These actions on the part of industry and regulators have endangered public health. They have also contributed to the growing division between independent and industry science, which in turn erodes public trust in the regulatory process.

Pesticides and Farm Labor Yield a Bitter Harvest

Shortly after the group of Mexican “guestworkers” arrived at a Tennessee tomato farm, they realized that their job was killing them, literally. In addition to being crowded into filthy trailers with no source of clean water, they and their living quarters were regularly showered with poison. Despite requirements for protective equipment, they had to go into the fields while exposed to pesticides. Risking abuse and retaliation for challenging their boss, some tried to use cellphones to record the spraying. In the end, they got their evidence, but then got fired.

The workers' struggle, which led to a lawsuit filed earlier this year, illustrates all the paradoxes of America's natural bounty. No form of labor is more ingrained in humanity than farm work, but the people who grow our food are being eaten alive every day by the toxins of modern industrial farming. Though consumers are more anxious than ever these days about the effects of pesticides on the food we eat, they seldom consider the health hazards facing the workers who feed our consumption. Yet the further you get up the production chain, the greater the danger.

Farmworker Justice has petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency to demand the bilingual labeling of pesticides for Spanish-speaking workers, many of whom cannot read English. The fact that after generations of importing migrant labor even this most rudimentary safeguard is still lacking, shows how little the government and employers value workers' health.

One monitoring project in Washington State, published by the Farm Worker Pesticide Project, found that one in five workers surveyed suffered "significant nervous system impacts." The health risks were exacerbated by incompetent enforcement of safety standards at the federal and state levels, and threadbare regulations on protective gear for farm workers. Finally, there was an endemic failure to promote safe alternatives to the harmful chemicals used in industrial agriculture.

The politics of the food system therefore disproportionately impact farm workers (including a huge number of families with children), yet they have virtually no political power, and don't have the option of selecting just organic fruit when they're working the farms in a chemical haze.

The consumer advocacy organization Environmental Working Group (EWG) published its “Dirty Dozen” list of chemical-laden produce, but it doesn't get at the core of the problem, according to Tom Philpott at MoJo:

My only concern about campaigns like EWG's Dirty Dozen is that they keep the spotlight on consumers and off of another population segment that deserves protection from the produce industry's pesticide habit: farm workers....
The agrichemical industry's response—embraced by farm owners, government regulators, and global aid institutions—was to promote pesticides that break down rapidly. But these alternatives, known as "non-persistent" chemicals, are much more dangerous at the time of application. That is to say, they're much safer for consumers, and much more dangerous for farm workers.

In fact, such dangerous working conditions are encouraged by our food system and regulatory infrastructure.

This week, a bill in California to enable card-check voting on farms, which would facilitate union organizing, was vetoed by Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown, who while governor in the 1970s signed legislation giving farmworkers in his state the right to unionize through secret ballot. The defeat suggested that the loyalties of even supposedly "progressive" politicians lie more with powerful business lobbies than with voiceless farm workers. The consequences ultimately wind up on our dinner tables.

1) The scandal isn't cilantro, or apples. It's 2 million people doing the third most dangerous job in the country for sub-poverty wages, while facing pesticide exposure.

2) We can't shop our way out of this: pesticides are a public policy issue.

Currently, it's private and grassroots efforts that are breaking ground in environmental justice for farmworkers. Along with labor-based groups like Farmworker Justice and United Farm Workers, grassroots movements like the Coalition of Imokalee Workers have raised public awareness of agricultural labor conditions and the link to public health as well as corporate power.

In Washington, the pioneering Excluded Workers Congress is pushing the POWER Act, which would aim to "protect the right of immigrant workers to expose labor violations without fear of retaliation” by boosting regulatory safeguards and legal protections for exploited immigrants.

Groups like the Pesticide Action Network and Beyond Pesticides have mobilized consumers and workers across the planet to push for a safer food system. And all the way over in Pakistan, an international campaign known as the Better Cotton Initiative seeks to introduce more sustainable growing practices to the country's cotton fields, moving farmers away from pesticides and improving community health.

It's odd that, even as we ruin our natural resources, Americans still hold romantic visions of the heroic farmer; perhaps it's our natural yearning to connect with earth despite modern society's alienation from our ecological genesis. To truly understand environmental health, then, we must think broadly about environmental justice. Locally and globally, from seed to stomach, we are all what we eat.

Michelle Chen's work has appeared in AirAmerica, Women's International Perspective, Extra!, Colorlines and Common Dreams. She is a regular contributor to In These Times' workers' rights blog, Working In These Times. She also blogs at Racewire.org.